It took a few tries to get to Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs Wildlife State Park but everything happens for a reason and the day I made it there was the day I was suppose to be there. Of course that day I almost didn’t make it there, alive. Usually I drive myself to the parks but this time I let someone else take that job. Long story short, she took a hill going about 30 miles an hour, we caught air like we were in a scene of the Dukes of Hazzard and landed on the wrong side of the road! Once we turned around and pointed in the car in the right direction, there were about 6 cars in the exact place we had just landed. It was at that moment I determined we had either landed in a time warp or landed on the other side of life!
Still laughing from that crazy experience, we made it to Homosassa Springs. We started the exploration with an encounter with a bear, a wooden bear, and then watched a manatee and her babies for a while. They were mesmerizing. It was after that the weirdness began. It started when a couple chimed in when we were taking our manatee pictures, then we were ambushed by 1,000 children at the underwater viewing area. We turned the corner and watched kayakers in the water with the manatee and a woman trying to actually swim with one. There was a huge hippo, Lu, that may be living its last days, an owl hiding a dead chick in its hole, and a fox being bullied by vultures! Thankfully the the ranger was there to shoo them away because they were torturing the poor thing. We even had a conversation with an owl through Pandora as the camera steadily took random pictures using keywords it was not programmed to respond to. What a day!
It took hours to meander through the park. We were witness to things that most people would never have the opportunity to see and we soaked it all in with a trillion laughs along the way. The park was pretty neat because it gives animals who could not live in the wild a home and it give us humans the opportunity to see animals we may not have the privilege to see in the wild.
Before you visit, make sure you check out the parks website for all of the up-to-date park information: https://www.floridastateparks.org/parks-and-trails/ellie-schiller-homosassa-springs-wildlife-state-park
